Easy SDKs for hard money 👉 ArkadeOS.com
After spending most of 2025 as a nomad, I've decided to move to Floripa (Florianópolis) 🇧🇷
I'm keen to meet any locals working in the bitcoin/fintech space.
About me: Software dev from New Zealand. 8+ years in crypto, specializing in bitcoin since 2022. Won 5 hackathons in 2025. In my spare time I like to surf, rock climb, and "read" audiobooks.
Today I learned that in bech32, the number "1" represents a delimiter and the "q" or "p" is the segwit version number
For years I assumed the p in bc1p stood for "private" lmao
h/t
Picked up
's "Bitcoin: A Work in Progress" at
Looking forward to looking more about Taproot, SegWit, Utreexo and Miniscript!
Who coined the term eatery? Such a bad name. It's like calling a school a learnery. It's not even a loanword
9/5/2025, 1 engagement
Just tried a Latvian pirts (wet sauna)
Incredible
I walked in feeling exhausted, irritable, and nauseous
Came out feeling energized and calm
Nobody spoke English so I basically had to learn how it all worked by observation, like how to grab the railings and sit down without burning my skin, or how to use the leaf whipping bundles
It was bloody hot…
Whipping myself provided a sensation of temporary relief but ultimately made me hotter
The cold plunge pool outside the sauna was freezing too
But that's exactly what I needed to shock my system
The feeling after each cycle was intense. Blood rushing across my skin, tingles of electricity
I downed like 2 liters of borjomi mineral water too. It's salty and tastes a little like soap, but is excellent for staying hydrated
10/10
8/27/2025, 1 engagement
Thanks
!
It was a great hackathon, and the fact I now have an account I can post updates on is cool
Funnily enough one of the biggest missing pieces of
was the ability to have sponsors contribute towards a pool which users can draw from to carry out their "zero fee" consolidations... and then post a message on Nostr announcing the "sponsored consolidation"...
I will see what I can do to integrate Angor with this!
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8/20/2025, 1 engagement
I have to admit I'm a hypocrite when it comes to exchanges
My general stance is that high fees are a relatively low cost to pay if you have an exchange that is BTC-focused, good UX, minimal ads/tracking, promotes self custody, etc
But in practice if I'm buying KYC I just go for whatever has the lowest fees
Same goes for wallets
I've played around with running a Lightning node, self custodial solutions like Phoenix, but instead of shelling out for inbound liquidity or a service like Alby Hub I mostly stick to custodial WOS, or even exchange based LN wallets
So yeah, I'm part of the problem
8/19/2025, 1 engagement
Working out and flossing have many parallels
Do it regularly and it's easy
Life is good and it's a mere annoyance
Suddenly stop and you can coast for a while on your gains
You feel worse but not noticeably worse
But eventually you adapt and forget what doing it regularly feels like
Then restarting sucks so hard (DOMS for workouts, gum bleeds for flossing)
8/19/2025, 1 engagement
#bh2025 was fantastic and so was
privacy edition
Had fun doing the hackathons, met a lot of cool people, and enjoyed visiting Riga
Now that it's over I've decided to take a break from X for the next 30 days
It's a great platform for learning and meeting people but the algo seems to think I enjoy getting into arguments with filterbois and big blockers
As the saying goes, "never wrestle with a pig"…
Plus I have plenty of work to do and new things to study, like
's PayJoinDevKit.org, Spark.money, ArkadeOS.com, Second.tech, etc…
Should mean I'll be posting here more often!
Congrats
on two back to back hackathon wins with git-futz -- first
now #BH2025!
See more here:
Just tried out receipt.cash by
live at #BH2025 hackathon presentations
It's a service for splitting bills with automatically generated Cashu + Lightning invoices
Receipt parsing made possible with
Very cool!
Check it out here:
Just had my first quality sleep in weeks -- maybe months.
God, I missed aircon.
Slept within minutes of getting into bed, woke up 7 hours later naturally, no dry mouth, full of energy and ideas.
6/3/2025, 1 engagement
7 things I learned from COVID:
Keeping a cool head and quietly sticking to your guns is as (or more) powerful than actively fighting for what’s right.
Cruelty, schadenfreude, and the desire to punish and feel superior are key parts of human nature. If given a free pass, many people will happily dehumanise and attack an out group (this applies to both pro- and anti-vaxxers, btw).
Money insulates us from crises. Lockdown was easier if you had a big house, aircon and a home gym. Private jets had less restrictions than public airlines. High-paid jobs had better security and an easy transition to WFH compared to low-paid “essential” jobs.
Conspiracy theories are overrated. COVID was more than likely a spontaneous event that was then used as an rationalisation for printing money, shutting down businesses, implementing digital ID, and similar measures.
Related: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/conspiratorial-thinking-and-multiple-outs/
Being a NZ citizen isn’t as special as I thought. It didn’t stop my government locking me out for 2 years. I made several requests to return, since my grandfather was dying of cancer, and I had run out of emergency visa extensions. Denied each time. Meanwhile, exceptions were made for various bands and sports teams.
There is no scenario where critical thinking must be abandoned for “the greater good”. As a rule, it’s worth being extra skeptical when someone insists that a situation is too urgent and you need to act without thinking.
Placebo and nocebo are powerful. In the early days of COVID when I was very worried, I felt sick many times (even with COVID-specific symptoms like no smell) while testing negative. Later on, I tested positive several times with no symptoms. Then, after I got the vaccine, I started getting heart palpitations and chest pain — despite nothing showing in my cardiologist’s exams.
I regret a lot about how I reacted to COVID, but the silver lining is that I’m now a more critical thinker with a clearer moral compass.
3/5/2025, 1 engagement
Excited to announce that I've just joined Rise as a senior engineer!
I'll be helping people get paid in the hardest money to ever exist (Bitcoin) as well as various fiat currencies.
Thanks Owen Healy for finding me such a great opportunity: https://linkedin.com/in/owenhealyblockchaintalent/
Check out Rise:
3/3/2025, 1 engagement
just won the first ever
hacking edition hackathon!
Thanks so much to
and team for organising a great event
And to my teammates and Octavio — wouldn’t have been able to do it without you
2/22/2025, 28 engagements
Just paid for my uber to the
hackathon using lightning over
2/22/2025, 5 engagements
Live-coding a Brazilian PIX payment service for the
hackathon using Lightning,
, and
2/21/2025, 8 engagements
2/20/2025, 7 engagements
2/19/2025, 2 engagements
TIL macOS has built-in background sounds for focusing
Still prefer Brain.FM and Noisli.com though
Who is coming to bitcoin++ by
?
Flying down tomorrow.
It’ll be my first time.
Super excited!
🔗 btcpp.dev/conf/floripa
Some of the speakers:
2/17/2025, 3 engagements
Gonna live-code a tool to check for bitcoin/ordinals/runes balances on a bunch of addresses today.
Haven’t done it before but I think it’ll be a good chance to demonstrate various scraping tools, strategies for bypassing blocks, ETL tools…
2/17/2025, 1 engagement
Man, I’m grateful I have good lactose tolerance.
Whole milk is fantastic.
Yes, it’s high fat and calorie dense.
So not the best for getting lean or before cardio or sedentary work.
But otherwise it’s great for:
Strength Immunity Hydration Skin/hair Recovery/sleep Joint pain
I've been telling everyone keen to get into software development for a while now that the game has completely changed.
You no longer need to know how to program or even understand the basics of computer science.
With tools like
, Replit.com, v0.dev, Bolt.new, Cursor.com, Builder.io, and Lovable.dev, you can already build better software than most engineers could three years ago.
Yesterday, I decided to prove this by live-coding an event management and ticketing web app with Bitcoin payments on X.
To make it more interesting, I built the frontend using only Carrd.co and vanilla JavaScript.
Check out the results here: 🔗 Live demo: https://events-app.carrd.co/ 💻 Backend source code: https://github.com/gringokiwi/events-app 📷 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/rHcYay4
And the livestreams: 🎥 Part 1 (no audio whoops): https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1lDxLzdANvZGm 🎥 Part 2: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1eaKbWdpyevGX 🎥 Part 3: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1MYxNwrkVZzKw
2/14/2025, 2 engagements
Complete!
https://github.com/gringokiwi/events-app
Couldn't get Cline to work properly with
but I'm still a fan of the concept so I'll be trying again later.
Some screenshots:
2/14/2025, 1 engagement
Just installed Cline.bot -- an open-source AI coding assistant. Excited to give it a spin.
h/t
for the recommendation.
LaserEyes.Build looks awesome. Like Wagmi.sh but for Bitcoin.
Just had another scam attempt—this time from a ‘community manager’ supposedly connected to legitimate Bitcoin projects like Ark and Joltz.
They use two sites, Grasscall[.]app and Call-WeChat[.]com, which operate the same way: they trick users into downloading a malicious installer that copies a hidden executable into a system folder.
Stay safe out there.
2/13/2025, 1 engagement
New Bisq scam.
Damn... it's a particularly nasty issue considering that PIX reveals full legal names and tax identification numbers (equivalent of SSNs) from both sender and receiver.
Makes it way easier to frame the victim -- and in many cases the banks automatically reverse funds.
Thinking about reusing my old domain TxBatch.com for something new.
At the time, I built it as the first “batch search block explorer.”
Today, it could make more sense as something like a UTXO consolidation tool.
Janus (x.com/januszg_) and Red (x.com/redvelvetzip) have done a great job with BitcoinLayers.org...
Comprehensive, with traffic-colour ratings 🚥 for all sorts of areas including custody, data transparency, node runner UX, finality guarantees, and reliance on an alternative token.
Trying out GetFlamingo.org by
.
Doesn't seem to work perfectly with Primal.net, but is great with Coracle.social.
Nice work Tristan -- also with Ordiscan.com which is my favourite Ordinals/Runes explorer.
This is a restaurant at a popular shopping mall in São Paulo (largest city in Latin America) advertising they accept Bitcoin over the Lightning Network.
Seeing this much more frequently in Brazil than I used to.
For years I thought my memory was broken.
I could swear I heard about Ethereum at the same time I started learning about Bitcoin.
But that seemed impossible because I got into Bitcoin in 2013/14 and Ethereum didn’t launch til 2015.
I had only just started learning to code and knew nothing about investment so there’s no chance I would have understood the whitepaper, let alone heard about the presale.
Yet I couldn’t shake the notion I heard about it at the same time.
Now (a decade later) ChatGPT has helped me figure it out.
I was a massive Tim Ferriss fan after reading the Four Hour Work Week.
It was the first book that made me realise that doing good at school, going to university and getting an office job wasn’t the only way to make a living. Or that it was possible to travel the world while working remotely.
Occasionally Tim would publish videos on his blog. This was before his podcast. And in May 2014 he posted a “Random Show” with Kevin Rose.
And right there in Random Show #24 Kevin mentions Ethereum.
He almost doesn’t bring it up or share the name. He describes it as “super geeky.”
But Tim eggs him on, and he gives a brief description, comparing it to JavaScript.
I’m sure that mention must have been the catalyst for me to look into what cryptocurrency really was.
Sure I had been using Bitcoin, but I thought it was a barter ‘mod’ for Minecraft multiplayer servers.
So if I’m right, thank you Tim & Kevin.
Most of the economy was closed to me at 13-15 years old. I couldn’t legally work, let alone open a business or accept/receive online payments. I had a bank account but could only do transfers and in-person card payments.
Learning how to use bitcoin and other cryptos completely changed the game.
No age or income requirement, no restrictions on where I could earn/spend my money. No need for parental permission or an ID.
That’s what allowed me to buy my first hosting/VPN subscriptions, start my first businesses, buy my first courses.
Eventually, I learned enough about crypto to be able to start working in it full-time without even finishing high school.
All because of one video.
I spent half of 2023 and almost all of 2024 completely off social media. Even deleted my LinkedIn.
It was fantastic—massive productivity boost. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to increase their output.
I had a solid network of personal contacts, mostly in the Bitcoin/Web3 space, so I didn’t feel much FOMO about missing news, innovations, or opportunities.
Especially not after joining the Bitcoin startup @Satflow_—which, like any good startup, had plenty to work on.
But the tradeoffs are real.
IMO, working and talking about your work are basically inversely related. One comes at the expense of the other.
If you work a lot, you don’t have much time for socials. And if you post a lot, you don’t have much time for work.
The biggest tradeoff has been my ability to connect with new people.
Sure, I’ve had more time for thoughtful one-on-one interactions with people I’ve known for a while. But in many cases, we’re no longer into the same things.
People who were into "crypto" in 2018/19 have since split into subgroups—Bitcoin maxis, EVM devs, Solana memecoiners, pro-/anti-KYC, OTC/P2P traders, etc.
Meanwhile, I’ve drifted away from the general "crypto" scene to focus on Bitcoin—specifically mainnet, self-custody, privacy, and L2s like Ordinals/Runes.
So... I can’t learn from them or help them the same way I used to.
Which brings me to my reason for opening this account.
I want to connect with others interested in Bitcoin L2s—people who see the value in Bitcoin’s UTXO model, decentralization, security, and simplicity, but aren’t so maximalist that they dismiss every use case that isn’t just HODLing.
I want to share what I know (and am still learning) about different L2s—after all, one of the best ways to learn is to teach.
And hopefully, build some cool stuff along the way.
So, give me a follow if you want to learn more and keep me accountable. I’ll start tomorrow.
